And then the room filled with screaming.
Chapter 4
Everyone rushed to their feet, the vampires so quickly, I couldn’t track their movements; the wolves, except for Jame and Fawn, were barely a step behind them.
Ryder, Myra, Jean and I were already running out of the room into the smaller space, hands going for guns.
But half a step into that room, we all froze.
Before we humans even made it there, the vampires had surrounded the room, and the werewolves had surrounded the people in the room. Those people, the tourists, were ten children aged from six to sixteen, four sets of parents, and Mason. Everyone stood in the center of the room, huddled together as if they’d been frightened and pulled together for safety.
They weren’t staring at the vampires. They weren’t staring at the werewolves. They were staring at the spiral staircase to one side of the room. One kid, maybe about nine years old, was trembling and holding her hand out, pointing.
I looked at the stairs.
There was nothing there.
“Everything okay?” I asked in the tone that said I was listening, I would believe whatever they said, and hey, I was on their side.
“He was there.” The girl’s voice skated up too high. “The ghost. He was there. He pushed me.”
I checked Mason, who winced and nodded.
Well then. Ghost. The girl must have thought Harriet, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter was a man. Maybe she didn’t get a good look at her face.
It was a little odd, in that Harriet didn’t usually push people around. But sometimes she touched a shoulder, a cheek.
I could deal with this. Lots of people believed in ghosts, even pushy ones. As long as those ghosts didn’t follow them home and insist on being believed in on a regular basis, it usually wasn’t a problem.
I knew Harriet didn’t want to live anywhere else but here. So what we had on our hands was a tourist group who was about to have a terrific story to tell about the haunted lighthouse they visited on the coast.
It was good for business, good for the town.
“We’ve had ghost sightings before,” I soothed. “Are you all right?”
She nodded and her hand slowly lowered. “It felt so real. Solid.”
I smiled. “Did anyone get a picture?”
Lots of heads shaking, shoulders dropping. Someone chuckled.
The tension was dissolving, falling away as I treated this like a successful whale watching tour. Which, I supposed it sort of was, only they’d been trolling to see a ghost. Being touched by one was even more rare than catching sight of one of the gray whales that pretty much lived right outside our bay.
Mason took over from there. “We don’t usually get such terrific sightings during the day. Would you mind if we mentioned it in our tours?”
The vamps and the weres relaxed slightly, though I noticed several of the weres kept glancing at the stairs.
Mason deftly guided the group out into the entry room, and asked them to sign in, leave a comment, or to share with their social media. A lot of selfies were being taken.
And still the werewolves kept their gazes on the staircase.
“What?” I asked Granny.
“Something,” she said.
“A ghost. Harriet.”
“Not her.”
